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AS I foreshadowed on December 15 on my Diary page, Queensland Ballet has lost one of its principal artists, Natasha Kusch, to The Australian Ballet. Kusch was with QB for less than 18 months after leaving the Vienna State Opera Ballet. She joins the AB as a senior artist. In a press statement released today the AB says Kusch will make her debut as Giselle when Maina Gielgud’s production opens in Melbourne in March.

Kusch is pictured here as Juliet with Australian superstar Steven McRae, who was a guest artist from the Royal Ballet when QB staged Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet last year.

Natasha Kusch and Steven McRae in Romeo and Juliet

There is significant movement at several of the country’s leading dance companies, but none more striking than at QB. It’s possible to interpret Kusch’s move as something that could create tension between QB’s artistic director Li Cunxin and the AB’s David McAllister (the two, of course, danced together at the AB) but it also points to how greatly Li has increased QB’s strength and visibility.

And Li was able to bury news of Kusch’s departure in an early-December press release. The big announcement he had to trumpet was the hiring of two dancers from the National Ballet of Cuba – premier Yanela Piñera and principal Camilo Ramos (the top two ranks at NBC).

As I wrote on my Diary page at the time, the pair, partners in life, join at the end of this month. Piñera joined NBC in 2005 and was promoted to premier dancer in 2011. She would have gained some knowledge of Brisbane when NBC visited in 2010. Unfortunately she wasn’t in the opening night cast of Don Quixote so I haven’t seen her dance live but there are, naturally, many clips on YouTube. It will be fascinating to see how the Cubans fit into the QB repertoire for next year – La Sylphide, Coppelia, Trey McIntyre’s Peter Pan and The Sleeping Beauty.

The QB press release said Piñera’s position would exist under Queensland Ballet’s International Guest Artist program, funded by the Jani Haenke Charitable Trust, but Li told me that Piñera will be a full-time principal – her position is not apparently like that of Huang Junshuang, who for two years was QB’s very welcome guest principal but not permanently with the company.

Further down the press release was news of comparable interest, the retirement of incredibly valuable principal Matthew Lawrence and long-serving soloist Nathan Scicluna. However, with the arrival of Piñera to join principals Hao Bin, Clare Morehen and Meng Ningning and with Ramos joining soloists Lisa Edwards and Shane Wuerthner (an American who joined QB last year), the senior ranks are close to full strength.

West Australian Ballet is seeking a new senior man after the announcement that soloist Daniel Roberts has joined Sydney Dance Company, where there have been extensive changes in the 16-member troupe. Chloe Leong, Josephine Weise and Sam Young-Wright have also joined and former member Richard Cilli has returned. Leaving are Chen Wen, Tom Bradley and Jessica Thompson, while Chris Aubrey is taken a year’s sabbatical. Company member Petros Treklis joined only last year.

Lee Johnston is SDC’s new rehearsal director.

Bangarra Dance Theatre also announced the return of two former dancers who left last year but are now back in the fold – and it’s very good news. Deborah Brown and Daniel Riley, both of whom also choreograph, are back with the company.

The AB also has three new junior dancers, coryphée Nicola Curry, who was formerly with American Ballet Theatre, and corps members Shaun Andrews and Callum Linnane, who are Australian Ballet School graduates.

West Australian Ballet opens its 2015 season with Zip Zap Zoom: Ballet at the Quarry, Perth, from February 6; The Australian Ballet’s 2015 season starts in Sydney with Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake from February 20 and Giselle opens in Melbourne on March 13; Sydney Dance Company opens Frame of Mind in Sydney on March 6; Queensland Ballet’s La Sylphide opens in Brisbane on March 20; Bangarra’s Lore opens in Sydney on June 11 and before then the company works on a film of Spear, based onStephen Page’s wonderful 2000 work of that name, which will premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in October.

IF Alexander Ekman is true to his program note he won’t read this review, or any other. It’s a shame, because I’d like to let him know how much I enjoyed Cacti. Perhaps someone at Sydney Dance Company will pass the word on, but then perhaps he doesn’t care. Cacti is, after all, a dance work sending up critics and what Ekman sees as judgmental intellectualising and pretentious dribbling on about meaning. In his half-hour romp Ekman puts a cactus up the critical fundament in quite an extensive fashion – which may mean he really does care, in which case I might point out that cacti thrive in arid climes, and that Ekman did tell The Australian recently he thinks there’s a lot of contemporary dance that’s too self-absorbed.

But enough of this theorising. Ekman has pulled off one of the most difficult challenges in dance, which is to be genuinely funny. Cacti is a delight: witty, effervescent, playful, surreal and joyously physical. The dancers, identically dressed in roomy dark trousers over flesh-coloured bodysuits and wearing hair-covering caps, at first kneel on low platforms and whack the platforms and themselves in an exhilarating display of energy, rhythm and co-ordination. Later they will strip down to basics and pose with cacti as if it were the most glamorous thing in the world to do. There’s lots more besides, but this is a piece to see rather than read about. The 16 dancers are adorable, there’s a glamorous string quartet that plays some of the score live and there’s a dead cat.

Larissa McGowan showed last year in Sydney’s Spring Dance festival (curated by Rafael Bonachela) that she, too, can cause mayhem in the theatre and it was a great delight to see her short work Fanatic given a larger forum. It’s a riotous homage to and send-up of the Alien and Predator films and fans of the genre. Natalie Allen, Thomas Bradley and Chris Aubrey deliver their roles with gusto (there is also a second cast).

De Novo opens with Bonachela’s Emergence, a work in which equal power lies with the music of Sarah Blasko and Nick Wales, the terrific costumes from Dion Lee in his first dance outing, Benjamin Cisterne’s super-sleek stage and lighting design and Bonachela’s dancers. You’ll note I say the dancers rather than the dance itself. The movement language fits these gorgeous people like a glove but for frequent Bonachela-watchers Emergence has no surprises. Bonachela has, however, an inexhaustible gift and appetite for collaboration with intriguing artists from other disciplines. This may be his strongest suit.